In its continuing effort to stay relevant in the gaming space, Adobe today announced Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2, which further Adobe's goal to enable "console quality" games like Shadowgun inside your web browser. 11.2 includes support for mouse-lock (3:20 in the video below), relative mouse coordinates, right/middle click events, multi-threaded video decoding, and the capability for hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics for gameplay at up to 60 frames per second. AIR 3.2 (Adobe's platform for building cross-platform web apps), comes with Stage3D for mobile, the technology Adobe released back in October for desktops that is now used in graphically intensive titles like Spaced Away and ApexVJ. Adobe also announced that it's collaborating with Unity to allow Unity customers to publish 3D games to Flash Player. The release plays right along with the Flash roadmap Adobe posted in February that also emphasized "premium." Oh, and the new Flash Player will automatically update itself in the background on Windows.

Adobe is incentivizing Flash 11.2's premium features by promising not to charge developers to use them until an app reaches $50,000 in revenue. From that point forward, nine percent of your app's revenue goes to Adobe, which keeps an eye on your finances through periodical reports it collects from developers who choose to use Flash's new premium features. AIR apps using premium features won't get taxed at all. These new terms go into effect on August 1st, 2012.

Ultimately, what Adobe's really up to here is an attempt to wholly reshape Flash Player's image — from a simple tool that plays H.264 video and cow-clicking games to a "game console for the web" that can bring game developers real money. Adobe wasn't shy about that point during a telephone conversation, repeating the word "monetization" again and again, but it's hard to say if an estimated 1.3 billion PCs and 500 million mobile devices with Flash and Air support guarantee that developers will develop immersive experiences for the platform.